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Role: To provide valuable nursing experience working alongside local staff in a variety of hospital departments

Type of Placements: Hospital, health clinics and some medical outreach work

Accommodation: Host family

Price: From

What’s included? Food, accommodation, transfers to and from our specified airport, transport to and from work where required, insurance, personal webpage, induction and orientation, 24/7 support

What’s not included? Flights, visa costs, spending money

Length of placement: From 2 weeks

Start dates: Flexible

By volunteering as a nurse in Tanzania you will not just gain work experience, but also provide valuable support to a busy profession in a developing country. You will see how resourceful nurses have to be working in hospitals that suffer from lack of funding and poor equipment.

Our Nursing placements are based in Dar es Salaam and Arusha. You will be placed in either a health clinic or a large government hospital. Your role will be mainly observational and you will shadow doctors and nurses throughout their day.

This could include ward rounds, clinics and observing operations. If you have nursing experience and make the effort to become a valuable part of the team, you could get given more to do. This may include taking blood pressure, weighing and measuring patients, dressing wounds, passing equipment and removing plaster casts.

You will normally rotate through various departments in the hospitals. You could spend time in surgery, maternity, general medicine, paediatrics, palliative care and work with HIV patients. If you prefer to specialise in one area this may be possible.

Facilities in Tanzania

Facilities in the hospitals and health clinics are basic and you must also expect to witness some shocking cases. It is important to be prepared for this and not to become emotionally attached to the patients.

Projects Abroad also organise regular medical outreach projects and workshops in Dar es Salaam and Arusha. These involve providing healthcare to disadvantaged communities in outlying areas who would otherwise not have access to medical care. This provides you with the opportunity to carry out extremely valuable work in a community based environment and will give you a greater understanding of the medical system in Tanzania.

While you are volunteering as a nurse in Tanzania, you will live with one of our local host families. You can spend your free time with our enthusiastic volunteer community, exploring the area.

The Maasai Medical Project

Projects Abroad also works closely with a Maasai community hospital, which is under-resourced and under-staffed. If you have a keen interest or experience in the medical field and would like to work closely with a rural community, this is the perfect option for you. Volunteers work alongside local doctors and nurses in a variety of different hospital departments. Facilities at the hospital are basic and treatments are sometimes not of the standard one would expect in the West. You should be prepared to see some shocking cases and try not to become emotionally involved with the patients. Ninety per cent of the patients are Maasai and the hospital runs regular community outreach programmes in order to educate and treat the more remote members of the community.

The Maasai Medical placement is available from 4 weeks. Given the private nature and often poor living conditions of the Maasai tribe, you will be living with other volunteers on the Maasai Community project in a communal house that has basic facilities.

You can join the standard Nursing project in Tanzania for two or three weeks if you don't have time to join us for four weeks or more. Please be aware that if you join the project for two weeks your role will be observational and will not include hands-on work. Volunteers joining for a month or longer will have more opportunities to build up a good relationship with the doctors and nurses and have the potential to get more involved.